Zeier Joshua D, Maxwell Jeffrey S, Newman Joseph P
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53706, USA.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2009 Aug;118(3):554-63. doi: 10.1037/a0016480.
Primary psychopathic individuals are less apt to reevaluate or change their behavior in response to stimuli outside of their current focus of attention. According to the response modulation hypothesis, this tendency reflects a lack of responsivity to important peripheral information and undermines adaptive self-regulation. To evaluate this hypothesis, the authors administered a response competition (flanker-type) task and manipulated focus of visual attention. They predicted that psychopathic individuals would display significantly less interference to response incongruent information than nonpsychopathic participants when attention was cued to the target location but display normal interference when there was no prepotent focus of attention. The results confirmed this hypothesis and are consistent with the contention that attention moderates psychopathic individuals' responsivity to inhibitory cues. Implications of this attentional anomaly for psychopathic traits and behavior are discussed.
原发性精神病态个体不太容易根据当前注意力焦点之外的刺激重新评估或改变自己的行为。根据反应调节假说，这种倾向反映了对重要周边信息缺乏反应性，并破坏了适应性自我调节。为了评估这一假说，作者进行了一项反应竞争（侧翼类型）任务，并操纵了视觉注意力焦点。他们预测，当注意力被引导到目标位置时，精神病态个体对反应不一致信息的干扰将显著少于非精神病态参与者，但在没有优势注意力焦点时，他们将表现出正常的干扰。结果证实了这一假说，并与注意力调节精神病态个体对抑制性线索反应性的观点一致。本文讨论了这种注意力异常对精神病态特质和行为的影响。
